2 posts tagged “greasemonkey”

A week or so ago, the lovely people at Flickr launched their new iPhone-specific mobile site. It's very nicely done, and there's one thing in particular I noticed that I've always wished for on their main site.

When viewing photos by your contacts, the "next" and "last" photo links don't go within the photostream (as they do on the main site), but they page between contacts instead. It's a really nice way to quickly look through new images.*

Having had a (years-old) desire for this feature on the website rekindled, I decided to spend a few hours with Greasemonkey seeing if I could make it happen, and I managed to do so, thanks largely to people who've led the way. Here's show_flickr_contact_context.user.js.



However, before you go charging in to install it, I should probably warn you that it's very much still at the "proof of concept" stage. Flickr's context boxes are surprisingly complicated little blocks of HTML, and (perhaps ironically) I haven't made any of the JavaScript in them work. Moreover, it seems that I've broken the functionality in existing context blocks. Moreover, the script only works when you've come directly from the Photos from your Contacts page, or if it detects an argument that it sets in the URL from the context paging block.** This is because the API call the script needs to make seems to be quite a complicated one, so I'm trying very hard to be polite with the usage of it.

Anyway, I thought it'd be nice to document even though it's really only getting going, so feel free to have a play with it. If I do tidy up any of its rough edges, I'll be sure to mention it here.

* A couple of minor notes on the implementation. On the plus side, it obeys the setting on the Photos from your Contacts page that sets whether or not you see five or one image from each. However, there's no way to modify this on the phone itself. Unfortunately, it's also hard to change contexts; in other words, to swap from paging by contacts to paging within a user's photostream. Both compromises are down to the lack of space for UI on the iPhone, though, so I'm hardly going to really complain (hence the hiding this in a footnote).
** Ideally I'd do this using Flickr's own convention: /photos/name/id/in/contacts/. Unfortunately, if Flickr finds a /in/ argument it doesn't understand, you get redirected and lose the context, so I'm using /photos/name/id/?contact=in instead. Ah well.

I'd hoped to do a lot to snaptrip over the weekend, and I pretty much managed to do what I hoped for. There's a lot of changes which went live today; a lot of them are kind of invisible, but hopefully they're all useful.

Firstly, there's some user interface changes that incorporate suggestions from people within Dopplr. You now have to authenticate with both Dopplr and Flickr before logging in; it was possible to use snaptrip with just the one, but it didn't really make a lot of sense. When you tag photos, they get a border in the city's colour (as they do if they've already been tagged). I've also removed the requirement to load all the photos before tagging them; you now get to do so in batches of 24.

Secondly, the behind the scenes changes. Google App Engine makes it really easy to use memcache to avoid loading data more than once, so I now use that, making reloading pages really quick. There's much better error detection, especially for when a network call to either of the services it relies on fails. I've also fixed the sort ordering in the statistics panel on the trip list page.

show-dopplr-link

Thirdly, I've added a lot more functionality to make use of the location information on both sides. Your map now shows Flickr photos*, and it's a "slippy map", so you can zoom in and out and recenter it. (It also shows the departure point.) It's also possible to use the Dopplr information about trips to add photos to Flickr's map. I should probably make it clear here that snaptrip will never overwrite location data (or trip data) that you've added yourself.

Finally, I had a comment on a previous post asking why you couldn't see trip tags on Flickr. Assuming that snaptrip worked, then the machine tags it's added aren't even shown by default- you have to open the disclosure triangle in the right hand pane. However, if you're using Firefox and Greasemonkey, you can install the show-dopplr-links user script, which will display a badge and link - like those for Upcoming - on each photo page.

Hopefully this isn't the end- there are still features I want to add, and the usage of the app when DopplrHQ first publicised it was a pleasant surprise. I hope these fixes and additions make it useful for you, though.

* Usually. There's a philosophical point I hope to expand on in another post.